Is Google Evil? Claire Stapleton on Bad Bosses, Bullshit Jobs, and Her Great Escape from Big Tech

00:00:31 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. Earlier this week on Monday, there was an interesting piece in The New York Times, an op ed by Tressie McMillan Cottom on how to fight back against big tech. She says start here with her piece. It includes a reading list of many books warning about big tech, including some that have been on the show by authors like Karen Hao, Yanis Varoufakis, Astra Taylor. And there's another book out today, by my guest, Claire Stapleton, that might appear. The book is out this week, so maybe it's a bit late for— for McMillan Cottom's list, but, it's a book out about Google: Don't Be Evil: Bad Bosses, Fake Promises, and My Escape from Big Tech. Claire Stapleton worked for many years at Google, so, it's in part, an autobiography, in part a memoir, confession. And I guess, would it be fair to say, Claire, a warning about big tech?

00:01:38 Claire Stapleton: Yeah. A bit of a cautionary tale for the young person who wanders into one of the biggest employment sources available to people today.

00:01:49 Andrew Keen: So tell us your story. When did you start at Google?

00:01:53 Claire Stapleton: I started in 2007. I came straight out of college. It was a very, rare window for a huge amount of college recruiting that a couple of tech companies did, but Google was really the new hot corporation at that time. This is so one year before Obama was elected, one year before the financial crisis, sort of Google was this sort of big source of hope and optimism. Technology was going to be the big driver of societal progress and not too many people questioning that at the time. Surely not me, as someone who was an English— [ed.: cross-talk; Stapleton was an English major — cf. 00:02:55]

00:02:26 Andrew Keen: [unclear] have to say. I mean, I don't always toot my own horn. I probably do often. But I was one of the early people to actually warn. I wrote a book in 2007 called Cult of the Amateur, which warned about the utopianism of Google, but go on. But then I have my own, skeletons in the closet on the Google front as well given that my current wife is the, head of litigation. So I have it both ways. But sorry. Go on.

00:02:55 Claire Stapleton: Yeah. So I was a humanities major, English major, I think looking for a real job, sort of casting around for, you know, a real career. And I saw a posting for corporate communications and it was very vague. It was sort of like, come tell the story. And I knew a little bit about the story because Google was as much as it was sort of exporting its technology and innovation at that time, sort of, you know, they'd acquired YouTube, Gmail, and Maps, and, you know, some of the other in search were sort of transforming, you know, how we navigate the world certainly. But, you know, I knew a little bit about the story, but as much as they were exporting technology, they were exporting workplace philosophy. It was a huge part of what Google was communicating at that time. So I got drawn into the whirlpool and that my job was a function that I never knew existed, and it corporate though not portrayed that way, which was internal communications. So instead of telling Google's story to the outside world, we were sort of supposed to pump up the story, the mission, the values, internally. And, so I started giving campus tours. I worked on Larry and Sergey's— the founder of the co— the founders of the company. They had a weekly meeting that was sort of a hallmark of the Google culture, very informal, come and ask anything, have a beer from the keg. It was even as Google was, you know, 10,000, 15,000, 20,000 people in that period of time at hiring like crazy, they kept this sort of folksy company feel through these sorts of internal communications. And so, you know, alongside talking about the culture and the transparency and the kind of special sauce of the creativity and the collaboration and all the office design, we were also talking about Google's mission to change the world. And the philosophy was basically get all the capture all this talent, get them so engaged and so fired up on what we're gonna do to change the world together. You know? And here I was a sort of kind of handmaiden or an emissary of that mission to get everybody high on the mission.

00:05:04 Andrew Keen: Well, you were too skeptical. Wasn't it a bit too good to believe? I mean, we'll talk about “Don't be evil” in a minute and that corporate phrase that you were involved in that Google adopted at least for a while as their brand. Did you ever question this? I mean, it seems as I said, there were some of us who were always skeptical. Maybe we're just naturally skeptical. But didn't it seem, Claire, too good to be true, especially given that you mentioned Larry and Sergey? People were becoming incredibly rich. I mean, you joined after the IPO. I presume you made a little bit of money yourself.

00:05:40 Claire Stapleton: Nothing compared to what the, you know, in

00:05:42 Andrew Keen: Well, but nobody can. I mean, I assume you've made enough that, you know, you haven't had to work too much for the last few years.

00:05:50 Claire Stapleton: Yeah. Definitely. You know, I so I started giving campus tours in the summer of 2007 as a kind of low level communication staffer. And I a lot of the people coming through at that point because there was still novelty to the campus, but we had a lot of European journalists who came through then. And I was here to take them around, show them the laundry room, and, you know, which I'd heard a HR person describe as letting Google be your housewife. You know, there's the you can send off your dry cleaning. There's haircuts. You can go to the dentist. So this is all on the Mountain View campus.

00:06:20 Andrew Keen: And there was the masseurs. The masseurs were always a source of great intrigue and envy. I think it's really creepy.

00:06:26 Claire Stapleton: Because they're right in the workspace. So there you are kind of going in and, you know, getting nude in the workspace. But anyway, the foreign journalists who I think, you know, it seems like there's, like, you know, a longer tradition of sort of, like, labor protections, right, in Europe. And so sort of, like, there was a natural skepticism to it. So I was learning how to deflect those questions because they would say, like, isn't this all kind of a big plot to keep everybody here all the time or kind of extract the most? It's sort of slightly exploitative and creepy and it's, you know, it's all these things, Big Brother. And, you know, so I certainly heard the criticism and I certainly was able to kind of say, yeah. I mean, it is a little bit about that. Though, of course, when you're 22 years old and you're thinking this is amazing that you can get a massage and there's all these, you know, I could understand the sort of, like, you know, rational thinking behind, you know, if you can take care of all these annoying tasks during the day while you're working, then you don't have to think about them, like, at home. So I heard the talking points version. I heard the skeptical version. Yeah. I think that I went through a very interesting training my first year, and I think it also raised a lot of questions for me, which is that they had a guy whose name is Fred Kofman. He was Sheryl Sandberg's sort of personal coach. He was a kind of valley guru type, and they put all the new hires, at least in the kind of communications and marketing group through this. And the central idea of this training, a two day training, was radical accountability. So, ostensibly, this was kind of about living your values in a complicated crazy world, but the actually, what they said was in life, you need to be a player, not a victim. You can't blame your circumstances. If you're late because of traffic, you know, don't blame the traffic. You should have left earlier. It was it's this it was a very kind of particular sort of brainwashing, and I found a, like, a G-chat that I said to my brother saying, today, I learned that if my team is dysfunctional, it's my fault. Like, it was a sort of idea that it's now you sort of see the strain of this in the valley of sort of high agency. It's like you have to sort of take life by the horns. But the way that this kind of, I think, comes down to a sort of junior staffer is that, really, you're not supposed to question. It really reinforces let's not question system in any sort of way. Let's not challenge authority because everything is on you. And if you're gonna climb the ladder, you better be a player, not a victim. But it was a very kind of particular sort of training. And I so I definitely had my doubts. I think that there, you know, there were certain things about, particularly as Larry Page took back the reins of the company in those first few years and became the CEO again, it was very hokey and also kind of grandiose. So, you know, I maintained something of my own mind, but I think that, you know, the for the most part, not you, but for the most part, the world was, validating Google's optimism. That with all the resources Google seemed to be harnessing, and Google was just making so much money and then kind of pairing it with this moral branding about, like, how Google was going to shepherd in, like, all these, you know, changes to society. I think also looking back, I was surprised at how much of the rhetoric was actually about saving humanity. And you see a little bit of that to this day with or really hardcore with AI. But Google kinda relaxed some of that.

00:09:30 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And, Dario and Sam have, have appropriated that language almost, literally, I think, from, from, from, Larry and Sergey. So, a quick question, Claire. You've, you've mentioned a couple of times that you were very junior. You're obviously quite junior when you joined, but this book, Don't Be Evil: Bad Bosses, Fake Promises, and My Escape from Big Tech, it's also about a woman who became less junior, acquired some responsibility, and eventually, I think in 2018, became involved in quite a high profile conflict within the company. When did you when were you no longer junior within the company? Was your rise meteoric? I mean, you lasted there, what, eleven years?

00:10:25 Claire Stapleton: Twelve years. Yeah. You know, the period the first five years, I was actually quite a paragon of the ability of young people to come in there and gain a lot of responsibility quickly. Because— because I worked on TGIF and I kinda did a lot of different corporate communications, when there was a new PR boss, her name is Rachel Whetstone, she came from London. She she was keenly interested in

00:10:54 Andrew Keen: And the wife, of course, of— the current Republican… [ed.: Steve Hilton, Republican nominee for governor of California]

00:10:58 Claire Stapleton: Yes. The potential first lady of, she's a fascinating figure. Comes from a long kind of libertarian tradition in the UK. She's very politically minded. She she had she was close with Eric Schmidt. And so when Eric Schmidt handed the reins back to Larry Page, she very shrewdly, I think, really focused on Larry's communications. And so I got kind of drafted in to help work on some of Larry's communications at that time, and I kept a kind of close log of all this stuff. So I was sort of an archivist of all of his rhetoric and his vision. And he, you know, really only spoke for a very short amount of time, then he, like, lost his voice. I mean, it's sort of, like, shocking, you know, can't believe it's real twist. But, so I, you know, I was able to work on all these sort of, like, high level communications at that time. Well, you know, I got promoted a couple times, but it was still, like, sort of like a mid you know, mid level manager. And then I got kind of vaunted over to the— vaulted over to the New York team, the creative agency called Creative Lab, which is the sort of, like, alchemist lab of basically Google's branding. But it was, again, kind of wrapped in all this sort of grandiose language about we're just here to change the world, and it sort of was like a bunch of kind of corporate gobbledygook all in one. You know, and so there, I continued to just sort of rise the ranks a little bit. And then, and then landed at YouTube where I was, you know, never some senior executive by any means. I was always a kind of, like, rank and file small team manager, but I was always working on things that were oddly zeitgeist of the company. So the Google kind of comms back in the day, and then as Google was shifting into branding and was getting into Super Bowl ads and all these other things. And then when I was at YouTube and marketing, again, a sort of just randomly consequential area and time as Google as YouTube and tech in general was dealing with more headwinds in terms of how the that it's public image and, scrutiny of, of its, you know, monopoly power, scrutiny of bad things going on in the platforms. And my remit within YouTube was to try to buoy the image to demonstrate that YouTube's net positive to society. So I think it's less that I was, you know, some, you know, big executive there, and more just always had kind of a catbird seat to these sort of different eras of the company as it grew more bloated, more complicated, more executive-y. And, yeah, that proved to be kind of a good story to tell throughout the book.

00:13:28 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And the reason I ask is some people might be watching this and thinking, oh my god. Another tell all book from another pissed off former tech worker. Of course, the best one or the best known one, it's been enormously successful and controversial, is Sarah Wynn-Williams' Careless People that tell all about, about, Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, which has gone into court. What are you saying then? I mean, Claire, in this book, Don't Be Evil— that hasn't been said many, many times before by everyone from fiction writers like Dave Eggers to Sarah Wynn-Williams and now this army of anti tech people. What what's in this book that will surprise people that's new?

00:14:15 Claire Stapleton: I mean, I think, you know, public opinion has just total is I would have never imagined in 2007 the public opinion about tech would be, where it is. I think that, you know, my book is, it's a coming of age set in tech. I mean, it's not whereas Careless People is really a whistleblower's memoir that, you know, really delivers an amazingly damning portrait of Zuckerberg and Sandberg. I think that my story is one that's very familiar to people who have been kind of, for lack of another way to put it, normie. You know, we started in a corporate job, sort of earnest, not jaded, you know, and sort of hopeful that in general, society was, you know, all ships were gonna rise with the tide. The tech was going to be the bringer of, if not complete deliverance, some abundance. And, you know, I think that my it was interesting for me to go back and trace, you know, just bit by bit how my own value shifted, how my eyes opened, the scales fell. So I think it's less sort of new information that would shock anyone. You know, there's a bit of sort of anthropology of the company from the inside. You know, I think that it's, Larry Page's leadership took it to a different place. The kind of consolidation into Alphabet took it to a different place. Social media and Trump's election took the company to a lot of different places that would that have changed, you know, internally and externally how the world sort of sees, you know, Google and these tech companies in general. But I think it's the sort of workers' eyed view. And and then also, I think the, the experience of and the kind of sad, you know, ending of it. But the moment of the tech worker organizing and the idea that, wow, they hired all these young people who are kind of idealistic and hopefully smart to on the premise that they could help change the world. And as we started to reckon with, you know, what does real power look like? What does real kind of corporate accountability look like? And that relationship between the workers and the management changed so quickly and so dramatically, that I think it was kinda whiplash, you know, for I think for everybody who was involved in that at Google. So, I think that's maybe something new and different is that we were kinda still trying to change the world from the inside, from a different direction as we kind of, like, lumbered our way through labor organizing 101. You know, and, you know, the empire struck back.

00:16:44 Andrew Keen: The empire certainly did. You you mentioned or we mentioned Careless People, which is, as you noted, very, very critical of Sandberg and, Zuckerberg. So critical that, the book is in court at the moment. It's very hard for, I think, Wynn-Williams to actually speak about it. I'd love to get her on the show. The subtitle of your book is Bad Bosses, Fake Promises, and My Escape from Big Tech. Who are the bad bosses in Google? And do they compete with Sheryl and Zuckerberg? Sheryl, of course, came from Google. So whatever bad boss skills she learned, she acquired, or whatever bad boss skills she manifested at Facebook, she must have, in part, at least, learned them at Google.

00:17:29 Claire Stapleton: Yeah. I think, you know, Careless People is so interesting because it really confirms all we think about this sort of elites, the tech overlords, the people on the private jet. The scale of my bad bosses is more workaday and more familiar. There's a fascinating book that the head of HR old head of HR at Google, Laszlo Bock, wrote called Work Rules.

00:17:51 Andrew Keen: He's been on the show many years ago as well.

00:17:53 Claire Stapleton: Thought about management. Management is so important. I mean, it's really it is a crazy it's something that deserves a lot of consideration, you know, operationally. It's a big part of how organizational dynamics and cultures play out. And he says in this book that Google specifically didn't want to give they wanted to constrain managers' power. Because if managers have too much power, they become quite corrupt. They become they can be they can abuse their power because it's just so it's petty in a certain way. And, you know, I think that the bad bosses that I'm talking about were just sort of, like, a level or two above me. There's there's a strong strain of, bullshit— the bullshit-jobsification.

00:18:33 Andrew Keen: Yeah. You mentioned, in your piece, and there's an excellent excerpt actually from it, in— in a recent issue of The New Yorker, “The Voice of Google.” You talk about, David Graeber's book about bullshit jobs, and that really resonated when you read it.

00:18:50 Claire Stapleton: Yeah. It it really blew my mind because I had just come on to a marketing team within YouTube, which was called curation, which I never really understood. It was curation strategy. I never really understood it even as I kinda got going in this job because YouTube is not a curated site really. Right? There used to have some sort of editors picks and, you know, it does have, you know, if you look, there can be an official music playlist or something like that. But, it was a pretty big team and we know we devoted a lot of time to, you know, doing the strategy, doing the internal optics, the, you know, the dog and pony show to kind of get more headcount, more budget. And, you know, kind of by way of introducing himself to me, my counterpart in London G-chatted me that this essay, which was preceded the Graeber book. It was an essay, basically about the kind of soul injury of having a job you know doesn't need to have need to be done. I mean, if we didn't do our job as curators of YouTube, nobody literally nobody in the world would notice. And yet, there was this, you know, this turn within the culture, particularly in the marketing, department of Google, and I'm sure this is true across big tech, where everybody's justifying their fiefdom at all times. And and so you get people who are incredible salesman internally of their work. But then as that translates down to people actually doing the work, you're sort of managing agencies, and it's a lot of I mean, I just found this team was incredibly demoralizing. People just kinda disappearing at the gym for hours in the middle of the day. I mean, it was kinda like a, you know, a make work or like a jobs program, and I was just sort of like, wait. I thought we were supposed to be doing whatever.

00:20:22 Andrew Keen: I know. I take your point, Claire, and we've all worked in organizations and seen that upfront. But is that unique to tech? I mean, you could have been working at Unilever or a big bank or Kellogg's or some other large corporation. You would have found the same thing. It doesn't it seems as if that's certainly not unique to tech.

00:20:40 Claire Stapleton: Oh, absolutely not. And, you know, Graeber was talking about lawyers, you know, this is there's tons of people out there in white collar jobs. I mean, of course, they're sort of, you know, McKinsey consultants and these people that are kind of just, you know, circling around these other industries, [unclear]. But I think that the only difference with Google and with the marketing department that I saw was that it was so, the budget was ballooning. It was so big because Google was just making so much money. There were no constraints, almost no constraints. And so people who are sort of clever, like, I've had, you know, this manager sort of my last few years there is the person I end up accusing retaliation after the walkout. She was a genius at just sort of packaging up the work to get a bigger budget, to get more headcount. It never really felt like as a person on that team that it was really adding up to anything because we would do these huge International Women's Day campaigns that no one ever saw, you know, World Refugee Day, and it was like you'd have people for months, you know, creative agencies, you know, working on the concepts and all this. And I think if you had, you know, like a CPG company or you are Unilever or something, you're selling a product. My husband's an architect, and he would just he would hear about what I was working on in these big social media campaigns, hashtag campaigns we're doing. And he would be like, how does this connect to sort of Google's bottom line or YouTube's even YouTube's bottom line? And but we were our work was about increasing the brand perception, which is kind of not easy to measure. Or if you can't really measure it. I mean, you could sort of measure it anyway, and you would have data analysts who would be kinda drumming up the stats to make it look like these campaigns were hitting the you know, hitting the ground running, and I was sort of improving YouTube's view in the world. Meanwhile, then there'd be a New York Times article about how pedophiles are where, you know, breadcrumbing each other through, you know, YouTube videos with code words and all sorts of things. It was like, well, that's definitely gonna take the— the International Women's Day campaign that we're running. But, you know, it just sort of seemed like there weren't many constraints. And

00:22:35 Andrew Keen: Right. No. I take your point, Claire. Although, it doesn't seem entirely coincidental that on the one hand, Google's enormous success was as or is as an advertising company, whether it's the Google search engine, YouTube, or perhaps even Gemini AI. They're still selling ads around it. And the fact that you were your job was in branding Google. So I assume those two things that the connection between its business and what you were doing within the business, it must have occurred to you that this wasn't purely coincidental.

00:23:13 Claire Stapleton: Yeah. Sure.

00:23:17 Andrew Keen: So what happened? So you were this junior person who became less junior, involved in sort of mid level marketing bureaucracy. You had bad bosses, but most of us won't have heard of them, certainly not of the brand recognition of Zuckerberg or Sandberg. Fake promises, which certainly is true of many other tech companies. How did you, quote, unquote, borrowing from the subtitle of your book, escape? What was the big fight you got involved with? And and was this brewing for a while, or did it suddenly just erupt?

00:23:53 Claire Stapleton: Yeah. I mean, I think that was sort of the idea of the book was, you know, how did I end up kind of blowing up my career? Because when I left Google, I was like, oh, you know, you know, on in a flume of righteous anger that, you know, my job had been sort of made redundant after the walkout and I'd fought back and the fighting back made everything worse. And, you know, anyway, so I sort of ended up, you know, leaving just a few months after the walkout. And so, you know, while I was, you know, righteous about this, I later over time, I realized, you know, kind of I blew up my career there because raising your hand to organize a protest, inherently comes with risks that involve, you know, probably inevitably losing your job, particularly if as I was in this kind of corporate optics management job. So it's not gonna be really well aligned with my job to be, you know, on Kara Swisher's podcast, you know, eviscerating the management of Google and all those other things. So, you know, the kind of the where I traced that was that, you know, I came back from maternity leave in 2018 with my first kid. It was it had been the summer of Me Too. There was this fascinating internal controversy at Google where, mid level engineer had written a memo about basically how misguided the all the diversity and equity, programs and all the funding at Google were kind of foreshadowing and sort of, you know, the right wing strain of, you know, anti woke, you know, DEI stuff. Basically saying because women are poorly suited to be in engineering. He was kind of cobbling together some different social science to say, you know, women are they're not rational, they're too emotional, they're more, you know, relationally oriented, they're not effective engineers. And so it's a huge waste of time and resources for Google to try to, you know, create equity on these teams and hire women. So there are a couple things where there was starting to be rupture with the female— the females of the company because I think, you know, this is not, total bro culture startup stuff. I mean, Google had always sold itself as a very equal opportunity workplace, your progressive workplace of the future. You know, and yet it was this sort of summer of Me Too, the memo, and then the kind of, you know, match that lit the flame was this New York Times story about Andy Rubin, the founder of Android, who had been accused of sexual harassment. It was complicated story, but Google had investigated these claims, found them credible, and they ended up saying, okay. We gotta get rid of Rubin, but probably contractually, however, it was decided between, you know, with his with the Android's contribution to the company, he was paid $90 million. So it was very salacious, golden parachute package that was reported on in The Times. And there are a couple of other stories, that were told in this article about women who'd either been propositioned as they were getting hired for a job or just harassed in the workplace or someone had had— a woman had had a baby with David Drummond who was at that time the head of the legal department, also oversaw HR, and they had a very kind of, kind of contentious custody situation, all this. Anyway, so the women of the company were starting to talk, and I had been really engaged in a listserv of moms of the company as I was sort of having, you know, kind of a bumpy transition back after maternity leave. And the women just sort of started telling their stories that were kind of just sad and appalling and sort of, like, I think, you know, it was a moment where Google it was kind of foisted by its own petard here because it was this is not it wasn't like Wall Street in the eighties where women, you know, expected sexism. They expected more from Google because Google always put itself out there as this paragon of ethics and workplace environment, all those other things. So I think that there's just started to be this gap that felt quite familiar to me having been so close to the messaging and the rhetoric of the company of, you know, where all these places where Google seems to be falling short. So the women kind of brought some questions to TGIF that week, the all hands meeting with Larry and Sergey, and, you know, they read the corporate statement. I think I was just it was this the kind of a very radicalizing moment for me knowing that I've been the kind of person to write those talking points before, which were designed to kind of absorb dissent, project empathy, and have it move right along. And, you know, I think it was it felt like such a kind of egregious moment where Google did need to take a step back and look at what had happened that the women of the company were brewing over here. The the tech guys are getting, you know, kind of so protected that they're that Andy Rubin's getting paid $2 million a month for four years or whatever his arrangement was with them at the end. And yeah. So I was I saw myself as sort of a conduit or, you know, it was an—

00:28:36 Andrew Keen: Right. Do you do you think that Google had a particular problem with, those kind of men? You mentioned Andy Rubin that, triggered, this particular storm. Eric Schmidt, of course, who was a supposed grown up who took over from Larry and Sergey, made it into a real business. It's pretty controversial in terms of his relationship with different kinds of women. There's David Drummond who got pushed out the company for, certain issues associated with his own private life. Was there a bigger problem within Google when it came to men exploiting women?

00:29:12 Claire Stapleton: Yeah. I mean, I think I was, you know, quite naive in a way, but it was a huge story also when I was a marketing manager, woman I knew had an affair with, Sergey, which I think kinda blew up his marriage [to Anne] Wojcicki, but they had worked closely together on the marketing of Google Glass. So that was pretty surprising because he was overseeing a kind of big area within Google X, the sort of innovation factory. So, I mean, yeah, I think that the power, the money, you know, the there was a lot of sly, you know, encouragement of, shall we say, relations when I got there. There was the sales campus, which was referred to as the honeypot. You know, I think that the you know, because there was such a focus on this kind of collegiate environment, be there all the time, you know, there were kind like, I remember in internal news, we talked about couples, like people who had gotten married and, you know, all these are sorts of things. So it was I think that, you know, it was it's not hard to see how that sort of kind of horny, nerdy college environment becomes abuses of power and some really kind of dark situations where inevitably, the person with less power is forced out to kind of deal with the problem.

00:30:27 Andrew Keen: Right. Yeah. Yeah. In the book, I mean, there were senior as you know, there were senior women at Google. There always have been, the head of Goog— YouTube up until her very sad early death, Anna Wojcicki [ed.: Susan Wojcicki; Anne Wojcicki is her sister]. There's Ruth Porat, of course, very successful long term CFO. Now I think is CIO [ed.: chief investment officer] of the company. Were there women in your sense, Claire, within Google while you were there at least in the twenty-teens who were themselves disappointed, shocked by what was happening within this company?

00:31:02 Claire Stapleton: Sure. And I, you know, I think we had a conversation with Susan after the walkout, and she was very much like it was almost a cliche of sometimes what women from another generation will tell the younger generation, which is, you have no idea how hard it was for me, you know, to get to where I am and to be in the position I am. And, you know, I and there you have to find your ways to advocate for other women without rocking the boat. I mean, there's this I really see that to get to that point of being such a huge executive at such a consequential huge corporation like Google, it doesn't come without trade offs to your own voice and ethics because essentially you are you fuse yourself with the corporation. So I— at the same, two things are true. I don't doubt that someone like Susan or Ruth Porat, cares about, you know, the treatment of women. It doesn't want, you know, for all the kind of reasons why there's mess. Right? They don't want that. They don't they want you know, I think Susan was a big champion of all the maternity benefits at Google, which are still, you know, kind of industry leading, and there's other are those other ways that I think that these women have, been able to do good things. I just think there's limits to any individual person, any individual leader, and particularly a woman who, you know, as they would probably say, has had to act like a man or, you know, had to Right. To to bear. Susan was a mom of five, which is insane when you think about the sheer amount of time that she put into being the CEO of YouTube. It's it's a complicated set of trade offs, I think, that come along with, you know, rising that high for man or woman.

00:32:35 Andrew Keen: And, of course, Susan knew Larry and Sergey right at the beginning. She gave them their initial garage space, so she was certainly part of the family. And in the name of, shall we say, affirmative action, I think it would be fair to say that, Sarah Wynn-Williams is most, controversial. One of the most controversial accusations in Careless People is about the sexual bullying of, Sheryl Sandberg towards, Wynn-Williams herself. So this is not just men behaving badly. It's also women behaving badly.

00:33:07 Claire Stapleton: I mean, some of the villains of my story really are women, particularly at the end there with my manager, you know, the kind of line of, hierarchy in my department of YouTube, I think, yeah, wanted did not wanna have someone who was organizing and, you know, who is sort of trying to flex a different kind of power was very threatening. And I think they, you know, the there's a human impulse to preserve the system if you, you know, if you are comfortable in that system, if you've have incredible, you know, kind of material investment in it. And, you know, I was representing

00:33:46 Andrew Keen: very rich. I mean, not you, a necessary person, although you became comfortable, but many of these very senior people became ridiculously rich. When it comes to your escape, what happened? Did you get fired? Did you fire yourself? Did you just get sick of the whole thing?

00:34:01 Claire Stapleton: So, basically, my, my boss kind of hollowed out my role two just two months after the walkout, and I was so indignant. I was sort of like, yeah, how could you possibly do this? Because I you know, at that point, we'd after we did the walkout, you know, just like the Time's Up organization reached out to us. It's sort of like women's, you know, legal help has offered us. And people were saying, you know, be very mindful of any changes to your role. So legal, you know, you're kind of become a sort of protected status after, you step into organizing. And, you know, it's not like we have the best labor protections in The US, but really, ultimately, you know, you're supposed to be able to kind of try to keep your nose clean and do your job, you know, as, as well as you can. And then your boss really should not be fussing with it. So I was like, this is completely ridiculous that you're demoting me. Basically, I'm just gonna hire someone above me, take people out from, you know, the side, make them my peer, you know, all those sorts of things. So I just pushed back through this, through the normal channels. I went to HR. I went to my VP. You know? And, you know, it kind of, you know, swung around and around. And, basically, I ended up becoming I think that my boss was so furious about how I was escalating this, and it was just kind of creating a big mess. So she just ended up kind of completely ignoring me for, you know, a period of months. And so what so then what happened was there were a core group of women who had organized the walkout, and sort of one by one, people were encountering very similar things. It was whether it was a transfer, being blocked, and people were sort of saying weird things about, you know, are you gonna have a good attitude? Are you gonna foster division on the team? There were things that were kind of retaliatory things in the air. And what and Meredith Whittaker sort of, like, now was a very kind of public face of the walkout. Her role was also dramatically changed, and she was sort of given a time limit, on she could either accept a new role or, you know, basically, you know, accept severance or something like this. So we decided as a sort of a group who was being retaliated against that we're gonna put our stories out there, which was, you know, the nuclear option, basically, because here I was had just to sort of just settled into a steady state of being kind of just, like, rubber roomed on my team. And so we put our, we wrote our stories down about how basically, like, you know, Google is continuing to, you know, say it's for its women. It's it's following on the demands of the walkout, and it's, you know, it's we're everything's hunky dory in the company. But meanwhile, the, you know, company is, you know, doing this very other thing with all these women in their roles, after the walkout. And so, yeah, we put our stories out in into the ether, and, Google offered us severance to leave.

00:36:44 Andrew Keen: So you blew yourselves up or you blew yourself up. You you knew you were gonna get fired.

00:36:49 Claire Stapleton: Yeah.

00:36:50 Andrew Keen: And did you get a nice, payoff, or you just walk

00:36:54 Claire Stapleton: You know, I spoke to, like, a HR person, a few years later who was suing the company for discrimination, and I was I tell I was telling her about my severance package, and she said, wow. They sure got you out cheap. I was pregnant at that point. So, you know, I was pregnant, and so I basically just asked for what would have covered me for that basically the next year. So through that next maternity leave and, you know

00:37:17 Andrew Keen: So you got a year's, a year's wages, which is certainly better than I'm sure Amazon give to their warehouse workers. Claire, some people might be listening to this and thinking, well, this woman was a bit naive. She acknowledges even she was naive. It's the nature of corporate life. And, indeed, Google has a reputation of a workforce which is remarkably entitled. People complain all the time. They get free food, free laundry, free massage. In in your experience in the eleven years [ed.: twelve — see 00:10:25] you worked at Google, was there a sense of entitlement, not just amongst the senior people, but amongst ordinary, workers at Google that they could be both good and, shall we say, evil or certainly good and make a lot of money at the same time?

00:38:07 Claire Stapleton: Yeah. I mean, I think, I, you know, I kinda look at it more from the worker perspective. But, yeah, I mean, I think there I was sitting at the side of the stage of TGIF for all these years. I mean, sometimes it was funny, right, that people would complain about they were trying all these social experiments to move around the junk food and the snack kitchens, and people would kinda get up in arms about, you know, about, like, we can't find the M&M's and things that, like, you know, sounded completely, you know, ridiculous. And, you know, what a kind of entitled or spoiled workforce. Sure. You know, there were a category of things because Google, again, it was sort of pumping the employees with a with it was, you know, pumping us with a certain level of, you know, you are the chosen people and we take care of you so well. And so it's sort of like there was a level of dialogue that could be annoying. You know, but there are plenty of things where, you know, the company, you know, would exert its power and the kind of, like, authoritarian, force that it had. I remember one of the biggest internal controversies I saw the first year was that they, they had a highly subsidized day care program, and then they just, like, raised it to market rate or, you know, where they had reasons why they're doing it. It was expensive and blah blah blah whatever. But, you know, it created great hardship for, you know, even if people who were, you know, kind of, I guess, decently well paid, workers. It was, like, sort of, like so the company could be callous and could change things around and only see things from the perspective of, you guys are all so privileged here and, you know, how could this possibly impact you? And this is annoying for us to be running, you know, in the red on this program, [unclear]. So so there were always things in the worker, management relationship that felt sort of contentious. We can give and we can take back. And, you know, I think but I think also that Google really believed at that time that, you know, treat people Larry Page said this all the time. Treat the workers well, and they will contribute tenfold. You know, we need people. We want the best team in the world with all these people— these minds combined. We can not only win every, you know, technological race and technical race, but we can solve these problems together because there's no end to our ambition as a company be— if we have these amazing people and we treat them so well. And that's, I think, what's been so shocking is that the company has swung back this completely other direction, and this is a trend across tech and, you know, into white collar industries in general where the bosses are sort of saying, you your job could easily go to AI. So you should— now you should be really grateful.

00:40:31 Andrew Keen: But is that really true? I mean,

00:40:34 Claire Stapleton: so exciting.

00:40:35 Andrew Keen: Claire, I mean, Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google was famously, of course, one of the tech execs at the Trump inaugural— inauguration. But isn't Google a little better, certainly, than Zuckerberg or Musk or some of the others? Dario and Sam, who are utopian and childish at the same time, or maybe all utopians are childish. Shouldn't we trust Google a little more? I mean, maybe the points you make in Don't Be Evil are correct. Google isn't quite the company it thought it is. But when it comes to grown ups in the room, or certainly grown ups in Silicon Valley, I certainly would trust Google and Sundar more than Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg or, Dario Amodei or Sam Altman.

00:41:21 Claire Stapleton: Yeah. You you don't have really the sort of noxious star. I mean, I think, like, Sundar is probably someone who's very good at harmonizing and balancing all these sort of different, you know, stakeholders. You know, he's not the kind of brash bravado of these other or the kind of ego and the hubris, I think, of these other people. I mean, I think that good— what's just kind of scary and interesting about Google is it's everything. I mean, if one company sort of has owns the infrastructure of the digital world and increasingly just sort of like the world in general because it's the lines blur, Google is just a tremendously consequential company. So, I mean, I think that, you know, I think that is it more evil than any other? Is it less evil? I don't know. I think there it's so complicated, and there's so many different kind of balancing forces. And there's still, you know, a lot of amazing people at the you know, at a company like Google, you know, who seek to do— wanna do the right thing and who wanna be ethical. I think it's more and more a question of, you know, using their own rhetoric against them to say, how— what are ways that we can hold these companies accountable? Because, you know, they amass more, money and power and sort of consequence to the social fabric, you know, with every passing year. So, yeah.

00:42:35 Andrew Keen: I mean, it's a problem, as you noticed, that Google's hard to avoid. You were recently on a YouTube, show talking about starting a movement with your writing. And, of course, the movement you're starting is in some ways anti Google and anti YouTube, so it's hard to avoid these companies. So let's end where we began, Claire, with, McMillan Cottom's piece in The New York Times on fighting back against big tech. You fought back against big tech. You fought and you lost, really, in a sense. In terms of your career, you were, as you said, pushed out, forced out, discouraged from joy from staying at the company. What can we learn about this fight against big tech, both inside and outside big tech companies like Google from your book? What lessons are you giving young, idealistic people who still no doubt work at companies like Google? What's your message?

00:43:35 Claire Stapleton: You know, I think that, in some ways, the newer or younger workforce has the advantage of the world not being so enthralled of tech. And I heard that, you know, they show a Claude ad before The Odyssey in theaters and people are booing. I mean, it's sort of like there's this even as we give more and more of our lives over to tech, there is a sort of natural mistrust that, you know, we sort of all share. I think, you know, my story is so much about, you know, your identity and work and how much we sort of outsource a sense of moral identity and moral compass and values to an authority figure. I mean, it's it exists in so many different facets of life, but it was very true for me, you know, coming into the environment of Google and saying, okay. The management says this, so I believe this. And, you know, that's my kind of, you know, journey in my growing up and my maturing, and it's the advice I would give to young people, which is having some skepticism, being able to kind of hold your own values in your own mind, letting work, you know, be part of your life without letting it take over your life. And, you know, and I think that, you know, my story of, kind of brashly sort of pushing back against the company and hoping that would kind of create some, you know, radical linear change. Of course, that's not how it works. But I do think that people are faced with all sorts of ways to push back, to show up for each other, to kinda create more solidarity that doesn't have to be, you know, the corporate line. And I think it's really, it's smart and it's healthy to cultivate that instead of just, you know, letting the overlords do their overlord thing. You know, and yeah. Having a having a healthier relationship with our tech, with our work, that's definitely the message.

00:45:21 Andrew Keen: There's the message. It's out. It was out yesterday. Don't Be Evil: Bad Bosses, Fake Promises, and My Escape from Big Tech, by Claire Stapleton. Used to work at Google. It's been out for, what, ten years of the company, Claire. [as spoken; Stapleton left Google in 2019]

00:45:34 Claire Stapleton: I've been doing more important things, having kids, bringing them up.

00:45:37 Andrew Keen: Congratulations on the new book, an important addition to the anti tech library. Thank you so much. Claire Stapleton.